Saturday, February 25, 2012

The discourse of “model minority” has been a central
theme of America’s racial politics since the late 1960s. The term is used to
refer to racial and ethnic minorities in America that have had remarkable
educational attainment and economic prosperity in comparison to other
minorities—in spite of their initial social and cultural disadvantages.

Historically, it has been applied to Asian
Americans, that is, immigrants from China, Korea, Vietnam, the Philippines, and
Japan. Much later, immigrants from the Indian subcontinent were added to the
group. These groups are said to have a higher success in education, income, and
social stability than the general U.S. population, especially America’s
age-old minorities.

As it should be obvious by now, African Americans
are the undeclared yet apparent targets of the model minority discourse. Its
elevation to the center stage of America’s popular discourse is artfully
designed to show that the educational and economic successes of recently
arrived non-white immigrants in America is an indication that the relative
educational and socio-economic backwardness of American blacks isn’t the
consequence of centuries of systematic exclusion and the emotional toll it has
taken on them but of congenital ineptitude or a culture of laziness.

George Lowery of
Cornell University points out that the celebration of the model minority status
of Asian Americans “derives from the perception that Asian cultural values of
hard work, family cohesion, self-sufficiency and a drive for success propelled
recent immigrants into and beyond the American middle class within a generation
or two.”

From 2007 onwards, African immigrants (whom Ali
Mazrui once called “American Africans” to distinguish them from native-born
“African Americans”) have emerged as the new, if officially unannounced, “model
minority.”For evidence, see the 2007 U.S. Census Bureau
statistics, which shows that African immigrants have surpassed Asian and white
Americans in educational attainment.

The breakdown shows that 48.9 percent of African
immigrants (of whom
Nigerians have an overwhelming numerical dominion)
have a university degree, compared with 42.5 for Asian-Americans, 28.9 percent
for European Americans, and 23.1 percent for the general U.S. population. (In
an interesting parallel, London’s Daily
Times noted in a January 23, 1994 article that “Black Africans have emerged
as the most highly educated members of British society, surpassing even the
Chinese as the most academically successful ethnic minority.”)

A 2009 study, which I republished on this page, also
found that “among high school graduates, ‘immigrant blacks’ -- defined as those
who immigrated to the United States or their children -- are significantly more
likely than other black Americans to attend selective colleges. In fact,
immigrant black Americans are more likely than white students to attend such
colleges.”

So African immigrants have now supervened upon Asian
Americans’ status as America’s model minority. This shift in the tenor of the
model minority discourse (from exclusive association with Asian Americans to
African immigrants) has activated interesting reactions from both white and
black Americans.

White Americans (especially conservative white
Americans) who hold a grudge with their black compatriots use this fact to
reinforce their argument that the location of black Americans at the bottom of
America’s educational and economic achievement ladder is the result not of racism but of
black Americans’ compulsive indolence.

News and discussions of the outstanding educational
attainment of African immigrants has also inspired divisive commentaries from
prominent African-American scholars such as Harvard law professor Lani Guinier who was quoted by the Boston Globe to have said, "I don't think, in the name of
affirmative action, we should be admitting people because they look like us,
but then they don't identify with us."

In other words, Guinier attributes the educational
success of African immigrants not to merit but to their taking unfair advantage
of the Affirmative Action, a policy that was designed to remedy the educational
disadvantages that descendants of slaves have suffered through measures to
improve their education opportunities—much like Nigeria’s “quota system.”

But there are also African-American commentators who
take vicarious pride in the success of African immigrants here. For instance,
Clarence Page, a popular and well-regarded African-American columnist for the
Chicago Tribune, in a 2007 column on the issue, provocatively asked: “Do
African immigrants make the smartest Americans?” He proceeded to answer his
question by saying, “judging by statistics alone, you could find plenty of
evidence to back it up.” He then lamented that “the traditional American
narrative has rendered the high academic achievements of black immigrants from
Africa… invisible, as if that were a taboo topic.”

Other black Americans use the high educational
achievement of African immigrants as a basis to counter the arguments of their
white compatriots who claim that African-American under-achievement is
self-inflicted. They argue that had they not been held hostage by the
psychological baggage of centuries of racial oppression they would just have
been as successful as their African brothers and sisters. In other words, the
fact that blacks from outside America have even outrivaled white Americans in
educational achievement shows that their own comparative backwardness isn’t genetic
or racial; it’s an involuntary capitulation to the psychological damage of
being born in a society that has historically weighed them down on account of
their race.

I can relate to that argument, although I admit that
it is becoming tired and self-limiting. I’ve always told people here that given
what I’ve seen of the portrayal of black males in American pop culture, I would
probably never have been a PhD if I were born and brought up here.

The black
male is invariably stereotyped as a violent, angry, good-for-nothing criminal.
Psychologists often talk of self-fulfilling stereotyping encapsulated
especially in the concept of the "stereotype threat," which American
eugenicist Arthur Jensen propounded to suggest that people who feel
stereotyped, or who have been stereotyped all their lives, tend to act
according to that stereotype, or inadvertently authorize it, often in spite of
themselves.

That was why although Malcolm X was the best student
in his all-white junior high school, he dropped out of school and became a
criminal for a while because his white teacher told him his ambition to become
a lawyer was unrealistic “for a nigger.”

But most importantly, the discourses on model
minority obscure a crucial fact: immigrants to any country are a self-selected
group who are not always representative of the populations from which they
emerge. They tend to be highly motivated, self-driven, and obsessed with
success in more ways than the host population or the population from where they
emigrated.

Plus, most African and Asian immigrants to America
come here first in search of educational opportunities before they transition
to the workforce. They must first take rigorous entry exams (such as the Test
of English as a Second Language, the General Record Exam, The Scholastic
Aptitude Test, etc.) and get high grades before they are considered for
admission and visa issuance.

It is therefore predictable that they will be more
educated than the general population. They are also likely to transfer the work
ethic that to brought them to America to their children. But, more often than
not, by the third or fourth generation, their descendants will fully assimilate
and become indistinguishable from the general population.

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About Me

Dr. Farooq Kperogi is a professor, journalist, newspaper columnist, author, and blogger based in Greater Atlanta, USA. He received his Ph.D. in communication from Georgia State University's Department of Communication where he taught journalism for 5 years and won the top Ph.D. student prize called the "Outstanding Academic Achievement in Graduate Studies Award." He earned his Master of Science degree in communication (with a minor in English) from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and won the Outstanding Master's Student in Communication Award.

He earned his B.A. in Mass Communication (with minors in English and Political Science) from Bayero University, Kano, Nigeria, where he won the Nigerian Television Authority Prize for the Best Graduating Student.

Dr. Kperogi worked as a reporter and news editor, as a researcher/speech writer at the (Nigerian) President's office, and as a journalism lecturer at Kaduna Polytechnic and Ahmadu Bello University before relocating to the United States.

He was the Managing Editor of the Atlanta Review of Journalism History, a refereed academic journal. He was also Associate Director of Research at Georgia State University's Center for International Media Education (CIME).

He is currently an Associate Professor of Journalism and Emerging Media at the School of Communication and Media, Kennesaw State University, Georgia's fastest-growing and third largest university. (Kennesaw is a suburb of Atlanta). For more than 13 years, he wrote two weekly newspaper columns: "Notes From Atlanta" in the Abuja-based DailyTrust on Saturday (formerly Weekly Trust) and "Politics of Grammar" in the DailyTrust on Sunday (formerly Sunday Trust). From November 2018, his political commentaries appear on the back page of the Nigerian Tribune on Saturday.In April 2014, Dr. Kperogi was honored as the Outstanding Alumnus of the University of Louisiana's Department of Communication. His research has also won international awards, such as the 2016 Top-Rated Research Paper Award at the 17th Symposium on Online Journalism at the University of Texas, Austin, USA.